


Before It All

by hangoversfinest



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman (Movies - Nolan), Batman (Movies - Nolan) RPF, Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Origin Story, Anti-Hero, Arkham Asylum, F/M, Female Anti-Hero, Murder, Original Character Death(s), Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-08-29 13:34:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8491729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangoversfinest/pseuds/hangoversfinest
Summary: Before it all, they didn't know what to call me.
Before it all, I was just a face. 
The Joker was born in Nepal. Two clicks north of a human smuggling operation. It was raining. We were soaked. We didn't acknowledge it. That wouldn't change things.
Wouldn't make a difference.
His name was Cal. Charles Cal. He was the first one to call me Joker.
You could say it stuck.





	1. Allison.

Before it all, they didn't know what to call me.

 

Before it all, I was just a face.

 

The Joker was born in Nepal. Two clicks north of a human smuggling operation. It was raining. We were soaked. We didn't acknowledge it. That wouldn't change things.

 

Wouldn't make a difference.

 

His name was Cal. Charles Cal. He was the first one to call me Joker.

 

You could say it stuck.

 

* * *

 

 

They’ll never tell you, because they never knew, but I thought that the Wayne Tower was a star. For years.

 

It was far enough away from our apartment and the dirt on window was thick enough that I had pressed my nose up against the glass and I thought it was a star. I thought it was my star. The other stars, they moved. They left.

 

This one was always there.

 

My aunt never corrected me.

 

She died when I was fourteen and despite what the detective thought, I wasn’t the one who killed her. I’d seen the kids in foster care. Living with Carol wasn’t great, but at least I knew what I was going to get.

 

There was a girl in school.

 

Allison.

 

Probably one of the only peers I’d ever liked.

 

When we were thirteen, she tugged on my sleeve during passing period and leaned forward, grinning, thin blonde hair falling into her face. “Hey, I popped some cigarettes from my foster-asshole. Skip fourth and come with me.”

 

Fourth was a math class.

 

I don’t remember which math.

  
But I know that I’d hesitated. I thought for a second. I liked math. Numbers made patterns, they were predictable. They could be controlled.

  
I still like control.

I went with her.

We went to the park and popped up in the men’s restroom, flipping the lock on the door. We smoked a cigarette before she slipped her hand down my pants.

I didn’t react.

They didn’t call me by my name back then either. It was Stony. Rock. Dipshit.

It always confused me that the masses assumed that quiet people were quiet because they weren’t intelligent enough to think of something to say. In fact, in my experience, it’s always been the opposite.

“What are you doing, Allison?”

She looked down.

Blonde hair falling across her face. “I just-- I--”

Her eyes were thick with tears. They gathered, swollen, on her eyelashes.

Her lips tightened, she unwrapped her fingers from around me. Her eyes steeled and she lurched forward, kissing me and knocking me against the tiled dingy wall. I kept my eyes open. She’d later tell me that they were supposed to be closed.

I didn’t like closing my eyes around people.

She pulled away, breathing hard, cheeks streaked. “I’m suh-sorry. It’s just… I wanted to know what it was like. To… to do that with someone when I wanted to do it.”

In short, I didn’t want to go to foster care.

Allison overdosed when we were twenty and I was on a job in Brazil. When I found out, I went out to one of the dancing clubs. None of the other men expected it. They sounded like apes when they watched me leave, hand wrapped around the wrist of two different women.

One had dark hair. One had blonde.

It wasn’t the right blonde.

Not like hers. It was thick and full and curly. It didn’t fall in her face when she looked down. Her body was full and healthy, and her bones felt different than the bones I remembered. She made soft cooing and moaning sounds when I kissed her. She whined and pouted when I was gentle to her.

I hated her for that.

The dark haired one didn’t enjoy the pain as much.

She bit her lip and squirmed.

She never told me to stop. I just knew she didn’t like it as much as the other would have. But I couldn’t do it to the blonde.

I couldn’t.

In short, it was very inconvenient when my aunt, Carol, died. She was stabbed on the stairwell two floors down from our apartment. But the illusion of Wayne Tower being a star had been broken long before then.

Carol was just too high to tell me.

An eight year-old, while we were on a field trip. Allison was standing next to me. Even in the poorest public school in the city, there is segregation. Haves and have nots.

Allison and I didn’t have anything, and we were standing in front of one of the haves.

I stopped walking and stared up at the tower.

The big W that I could recognize even in the day.

The have walked into me. He complained a lot. “What are you stupid, idiot? What are you looking at? It’s just Wayne Tower.”

(My star.)

Allison pushed him. I only stared.

He didn’t like that.

I could tell by the look on his face.

He would’ve rather had Allison push him again than to have me stare at him like that. When I went home that night, Carol was on a bender. She was angry. I was home late. She wanted to know where I was. She thought I was talking to someone. Get her in trouble. Get her sent up state.

Carol was schizophrenic.

She tightened her bony hands around my arms and twisted. “Where were you, you little fag? Where did you go? Who did you talk to?”

I didn’t talk to anyone.

I went to the park with Allison and we threw rocks at the shed that kept all of the maintenance equipment. I remember now that she had a bite mark on her leg. About midway up the thigh. I remember because I pointed it out to her. She looked down and her blonde hair fell into her eyes. She shook her head and said something about it being stupid that grown ups were so much bigger and stronger than children.

I’d already told Carol that I was with Allison.

She didn’t believe me.

“Who were you with?” She shook me. She dug her claw-like nails into my arm.

I hadn’t been with anyone.

She didn’t believe me.

She shoved me backwards and I hit my head against the wall. I fell. She picked me up by the front of my shirt and shook me again. But I couldn’t see straight. I’d hit my head. I couldn’t focus. Who was I talking to? Was I with-?

Allison. I was with Allison.

I stared at her like I stared at the boy earlier.

I tried to make her face come into focus.

And I stared at her.

Carol’s hands fell from my arms. She took a step back. Her mouth opened and then closed like a fish at the aquarium. She stepped away again, pulling a hand up to massage the pit of her elbow, bored with holes like a cheese grater.

“Fucking psycho,” she muttered. “You fucking psychopath.”

When she died, I got put in with a family that wasn’t too bad. No one ever touched me like they touched Allison. There were a couple of bigger boys there who thought that they could push me around.

I let them hit me once.

I was moved away from that home pretty quickly. They tried to put me in a juvenile detention facility, but there was the bruise on my face. It looked a lot worse than it was. I was able to say it was in self defense. Neither of the other boys could argue with me.

One was still recovering from his concussion. It took the other three months to wake up from the coma.

The second foster home took me away from Allison.

The other side of the city.

We rode the max together. By then, if we were alone, I would close my eyes when we kissed. She would drape her legs over mine. I would hold her little hand in my bigger one and I would rub my thumb over the small blue veins running under her skin.

This lasted for two years.

It doesn’t seem like very long now. A blink.

But I think about those two years sometimes.

When she was sixteen, Allison killed her foster dad. She hit his face so many times with a cinder block that the body didn’t even look like a man. His dick was hanging out of his pants, soft and unassuming. She went to jail. Maximum security for women. I visited her until I was eighteen.

She told me that it was better in prison.

“No one touches me like that anymore,” she smiled, pushing her blonde hair back. “In fact, it’s happened to a lot of women here. We’ve talked to each other about it. They taught me some things.”

She stopped. Her smile softened. Her eyes softened.

“It’s not that bad in here,” she murmured. “I mean, I don’t really get to have you. If you were here, it would be perfect.”

I didn’t like that.

I wanted to be back on the max.

If she hadn’t killed her foster dad, this wouldn’t have happened. I would still be in Gotham, riding the max with Allison.

Coming back was like coming home, but without her.

She’d been dead for seven years by then.

No one even remembered my name anymore.

They all just called me: The Joker.


	2. Amanda Waller. (I)

**** It was four years after she died that I heard someone tell a story about me.

The old man was more than halfway through his story before I realized that he was talking about me. I recognized the murders. It had been in Mexico. A husband and wife.

The little boy lived.

It isn’t that I don’t kill children.

I do.

I have.

The little boy stayed in his room. Asleep. He didn’t see me. I didn’t see him. There wasn’t any need for him to die.

So he didn’t.

“... This not man.” The old man in the bar said, voice thick with beer and some eastern European tongue. “This not ghost. This devil. He smiled in red light and blood curled in the lines on his face. There… I saw hell in that smile.”

I recognized the old man.

I recognize all faces.

It is dangerous to forget.

He was sitting in the room when the contractor tried to avoid paying me. He called the price extortion for killing simple village folk. I told him that there was a second price, but it would be much higher.

His security fell like children. And the contractor was scrabbling for the door, hands slapping at the oiled wood as he tried to flee. I nailed his tongue to the table and cut off his ear.

I let him live.

One of the other patrons in the bar asked the old man what my name was.

I leaned in here.

The old man shook his head. “Does devil have name?  _ Net. _ He does not. This man was contracted as  _ dzhoker… _ ahh, I believe English is, joker?”

Joker? Someone repeated, skeptical. His name is Joker?

“I believe. It is hell. Hell in his smile.”

Where’s Joker from? What was his story?

The old man believed that I was from hell. I crawled from a crevice in the earth naked and blacked by smoke and char. I smelled like brimstone and couldn’t be killed.

The truth was worse.

The truth started with a woman named Amanda Waller.

I had been recruited by one of the nameless. That’s what the recruits called them. The nameless. Black suits, black glasses. Not very nice suits, not very nice glasses. They were designed to blend into crowds.

I can’t remember what he said to me. What he did to convince me to show up in the dingy warehouse.

I just remember that I was there.

There were a line of us.

We were asked to stand in line and then we were bagged and tagged. We were marked with tattoos and had chips put into the base of our skulls.

Then we were trained.

For ten months, it was only sweat and cold.

There were fifteen recruits in the beginning, three in the end.

Four quit after a week.

Amanda Waller was brought down to the warehouse. She stood in front of the four and stared at them, impassively. Then, her eyes swept over the rest of us. It was the first time she’d seen me. Those eyes stopped.

We watched each other.

She also had a stare.

It matched mine.

“Step forward.”

I did.

She circled me, a vulture with teeth and a pantsuit. She bent down and picked up a crowbar and stood in front of me. “Give me this one’s file, Jameson.”

“But Miss Waller, the others--”

“I will deal with the others. Give me his file.” Clipped. She wouldn’t ask a third time.

My file was small. I saw a picture of me that I hadn’t given to them on the first page, held in with a paperclip. Her eyes slipped down the page quickly. When she came back to me, there was nothing to read on her face. “Have you killed anyone before?”

No.

Her lip twitched. She stepped forward. Her voice softer. “Have you ever been happy?”

I thought about Allison on the max, her head in my lap. Her shaking breaths against my chest when we fell in together.

No.

“Do you want to be?” It’s a whisper.

A promise.

I stared at her.

She smiled. A big, slow smile. “If I press this button--” a small black remote in her pocket “--the chip implanted in your spine will tell your brain to release serotonin. You will experience happiness.”

What’s the catch?

I thought she wouldn’t have been able to smile any wider. She did. She could.

“Kill one of them.”

One of the four.

She handed me the crowbar and pressed the button.

If there were words to describe what I felt, I would use them. Poetics has never been a strong suit of mine. I barely remember the moment now, flashes of light and warmth starting in my stomach and blossoming throughout my chest and behind my eyes. A wild, unfamiliar expression took my face.

It stayed there, even when I staggered back from the body.

It barely appeared human.

I looked up at the other three and then at her.

Amanda Waller’s smile was not hidden. I could tell that it felt like mine, just by looking at her. It warmed her bones. Made her stomach bubble pleasantly. “Don’t wait for me.”

Of the twelve recruits who did not pass training, I killed seven.

One killed himself.

He wrote a note.

Couldn’t keep going. Didn’t want the last thing he ever saw to be  _ the smile. _

Drew one on his own face in the blood from his opened wrists.


	3. Amanda Waller. (II)

It was after the first mission with the project.

Five of us went out, four came back.

One died, landing poorly from a helicopter jump. His femur stuck out of his leg, through his fatigues. “I… I can’t walk.”

One of the recruits pulled out his gun.

By then we already knew that there wasn’t room for broken things where we were. I remember his face from the beginning, that first day in the warehouse, and I remember his face the day he killed himself. He’s the one who drew my smile on his face.

His cheeks were sunken. Eyes rimmed in black powder that he chose for himself. It made the blue almost seem psychotic.

I stepped in front of him.

“What’s that smiler, you want this one for you? Okay, my soul’s black enough as is. I don’-- don’ need it any blacker. I don’t think you got one anymore. No soul. No Soul Smiler.”

I didn’t like guns.

I didn’t like the evidence that they left. Powder on the hands. Fingerprints on the barrel. A loud crack of sound that couldn’t be mistaken for thunder. The spent bullet. The hot nozzle.

I pulled the knife from its strap. Seven inches long. Serrated on one side. Thick leather grip.

I put it in the base of the broken thing’s skull.

I wiped the blade on my pants.

I was still wearing those pants and that blood when we came back to the warehouse. The others were peeling off their fatigues, ready for a shower and some food. Not hot food. They only gave us protein shakes. Nutrient pills. Soldier rations.

They stopped when we saw that Amanda Waller was standing there.

Her eyes found me, they always did.

We stared at each other.

More intimate than a hello.

“Come with me.”

Her office was closer than I’d thought. The car ride only last a mile, fifteen minutes with traffic, only six if I’d ran. She didn’t speak in the car. She didn’t speak on the first elevator. Or the second one hidden in a closet full of cleaning supplies. She didn’t speak when I sat down in the chair she gestured to, or when she sat across from me.

There was a table and a board between us.

I recognized the game, chess.

“Have you ever played?”

I hadn’t.

She explained the pieces. She started with the queen and ended with the king. The first time she played me, she took away everything but her queen and her king.

If that first game had been a battle, Amanda Waller would have neatly wiped my blood off of her hands and stepped over my gored body. Before then, I hadn’t had to acknowledge that I didn’t lose well. And that there was no way I could beat her.

The second time we played, I lost, but I’d managed to put her king in check once.

The third time we played, when we set up the board, she raised her eyebrows at me.

There were only four players on the field. Two kings and two queens.

She won.

But it took twenty minutes.

She leaned back into her chair and smirked at me. She raised the tumbler of whiskey to her thick lips and finished the glass. She picked up a piece, a pawn. “These are just bodies. Their only purpose is dying so that other plans can fall into place.  _ He _ \--” she didn’t even touch the king, disdain heavy in her voice “-- can’t do anything. He is only a weakness. Yet, without him, you lose. Imagine a board without him.” Her eyelids lowered.

Imagine a board without the king.

Without the rope around her wrists.

She picked up the queen and held it between us. “This is who you want to be. The others, even the ones who aren’t pawns, are limited in what they can see or what they can do. She-- she is only limited by the brain behind her.”

We played chess often.

The others would go to bars or sleep. I would play chess with Amanda Waller. It was a sign of respect when she started including more and more pieces.

It took four months for me to win the first game.

Amanda Waller lost worse than I did.

She was savagely brutal with me after that.

But eventually I won again.

And again.

Soon I began winning more than she did.

“Every possible outcome,” she smirked, halfway through her fourth drink. She drank more when she lost. “You take every possibility into consideration. And to believe that I found you in a gutter. A wild dog chasing cars… What would you do if you caught it?”

I didn’t say anything.

Her smile curled. “You would drive it into the river and watch the people scream around you.”

Amanda Waller is still chained to her king.

When the project was declared a failure, I could hear her screaming with her king. There was more to this. More to this project. She never said my name. She never knew it.

She is still chained to her king.

I built a board without one.

There is just a queen and many, many pawns.

Well, there are a few exceptions.

I have a rook.

She wasn’t expected.

There’s no way to expect her.

The other side of the board, however, is something I couldn’t have expected either. A perfect mirror to my own.

An occasional knight. Maybe a bishop or two.

But a queen and only pawns.

The queen doesn’t let the pawns die like I do.

And I will not kill that queen.


	4. Harley. (I)

They thought that we met in Arkham.

The first time I saw her, we were in New York. I was at a coffee shop, scoping out a target who doesn’t matter anymore, and she was walking by. In one hand she loosely held onto a manilla folder. Slung over her shoulder was a backpack.

Her hair caught the light.

I…

I thought it was Allison.

I abandoned the target and followed her for half of a block before I managed to bump into her. The manilla folder hit the concrete and sprayed everywhere. It landed in a puddle.

Resumes.

Harleen Frances Quinzel. PhD.

Internships at John Hopkins, St. Joseph’s and Green Acres Medical Facility. Graduated with top honors from Yale. Volunteer hours with those deemed unfit for society. Worked on three published research papers in regards to criminal psychology.

All that before I looked into her eyes.

It wasn’t hard to talk her into the coffee shop. We took a booth near the window and she sipped on a tea and picked apart a scone. Twenty minutes into the conversation, she forgot about the scone and spoke with wild enthusiasm that burst into her blue eyes.

She asked me to call her Harley.

We spoke for three hours.

We went to the bathroom together and I ran my hand up the inside of her soft thigh. The noise she made was animal. A whine that I could feel against my lips. She seemed to melt under careful touches.

She tried to be quiet.

She sincerely did.

But quiet had never been in Harley’s nature.

She didn’t seem to care that I wouldn’t tell her my name.

I didn’t lie to her and tell her that I’d call her.

The next time I saw her, we were in Arkham.

I was being walked down the hall. The nose of a gun pressed into my back. Heavy, clinking chains connected the collar around my throat to the cuffs around my ankles and wrists. The guards discussed muzzling me like a dog.

It would’ve been smarter for them if they had.

Harleen Frances Quinzel stepped through a small doorway talking with an orderly. There was a crease between her eyebrows and that hair was pulled away from her face. Glasses perched on the bridge of a bladed nose.

Harley has never been beautiful.

Despite what everyone says, she is not classic beauty. But she’s hard to look away from.

And the guard’s eyes slide over her hungrily.

I could almost see him salivating.

She wore long, conservative black slacks and rubber shoes. Her shirt was loose and made of thick material, hiding any lines of her waist.

She saw the guard first, and she recognized the look in his eyes. Annoyed, she moved on to me.

And didn’t look away.

Her mouth opened.

The hard lines on her face softened.

I heard her breath catch.

I smirked.

It had been so long since my face felt any desire to naturally form an expression that that moment, in that dingy hallway, took on a surreal aspect.

It wasn’t helped by what happened afterwards.

My chains chattered and Harley screamed.

I left myself inside of her and sank forward, breathing heavily into her collar bone. Her legs, wrapped around my hips, slackened, but only a little. There was a whine in her voice, like the aftershocks of what she’d experienced were rippling down her legs and up through her chest.

“I can’t believe I did that,” she breathed. “I-I can’t believe…”

I told her to be quiet, and then kissed her to prove the point.

I kissed her in the way that Allison liked to be kissed when we were done. Soft. Allison called it “toe curling.”

Harley’s eyes were closed.

Mine were not.

“You killed people.” She murmured into my mouth, adjusting her hips so I would be deeper inside of her. “I saw yuh-your…  _ ahhh _ ” Choked moan. “I saw your file. I’m your doctor. I’m supposed to help you.”

Okay. I told her, pulsing my hips forward slowly. I liked the way her voice hitched. Help me.

We didn’t get much done.

She would try and start each of our sessions constructively. There would be a table in between us. She kept her legs crossed. Her shirts were so shapeless, you would hardly be able to tell there was a person under there.

It was interesting watching her fight herself.

I’ve never actively tried to seduce anyone.

Not Allison. Not Harley.

They seemed to come to me.

For Allison, I think it’s because I was there. I think it’s because I never asked for it. That didn’t matter to me. She gave things to me because I never expected them from her.

With Harley, it’s like I gave off a smell. She would catch a sip of it and then she would want more. Hungrily, like an addict she would lap at it. She would think that she’d had enough, and then change her mind, crawling back for more.

“I still don’t know your name.” She murmured, perched on top of me. She was so warm. She quivered. And the starving want in her smile bled into her eyes. “Come on, give me something to scream.”

I pushed up, ripping around and pinning her down onto the table. I told her that I’d give her something to scream about.

When we were done, I told her what Cal called me.

“The Joker, huh?” She asked, smirking and wiggling up next to me. “I can work with that.”

That was the first time I was  _ the _ Joker.


End file.
